


untitled, prolog

by spoke



Category: TH White - The Once and Future King series
Genre: Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2005
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-25
Updated: 2005-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-30 01:28:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/pseuds/spoke





	untitled, prolog

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kezya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kezya/gifts).



 

 

The sky is pale with the light of the sun that has not quite set, that will not until the darker months are upon them. In a tower beneath this soft red light, the children of Morgause, Queen of Lothian and Orkney, are sleeping. They are oblivious to the wind in the room, and the stirrings they make as they sleep, and indeed to any noise.

All but one.

Agravaine is woken by confused dreams of the unicorn, and of his mother, and of the southern knights. He has gone down to his mother's room. He might have been seeking comfort or checking to see that she was alone; in his dream, she had not been. Unfortunately, being still lost in the haze of dreams, he does not understand where he is or what he is doing.

In his confusion, he believes that he does see one of the southerners in the bed where only his father should be. He advances on the bed with the same black rage in his eyes that filled them when he slew the unicorn, and the only real difference between the two deaths is that now he is silent.

Until his mother's hand grasps the knife and his own hand. The last thing Morgause sees is the eyes of her son, and his expression twisting as the shock of it wakes him. Agravaine screams briefly as he recoils, falling away from the bed.

***

It is the scream that wakes Gawaine, but it being so short, he does not fully wake. Instead he drifts between the sleeping and the waking worlds, trying to recapture his dream. He has the feeling he was dreaming something important, and so he instinctively clings to the world of the dream and whatever it was trying to tell him.

For long moments he remains nearly unaware of such things as Gareth and Gaheris whispering, and Gaheris' departure from the room. Only a small portion of his mind is able to recognize that something is amiss, and listens to the whispers as his soul listens to the sound of the sea and the creaking of a boat. On the boat, his Mother is talking to him, and he knows he does not want to listen even as he knows he should.

In the drafty, broken silence of the room, Gaheris is about seeing to whatever it is that's the matter; the last shreds of his waking self follow the soft footsteps away. He retreats fully into the dream, into his Mother whispering darkness and power on a boat that seeks to cast her into the sea. He knows that soon she will be lost, and he knows that if he were awake he would be trying to save her. But he is not awake, and he cannot move, and he does not want to listen to what his Mother is saying.

When he is shaken back into consciousness, the dream is lost. Nor will he remember having woken up at all.

***

Gaheris is the one unfortunate enough to find Agravaine. His older brother is staring at the knife in his hands, looking both as if he were about to be sick and as if he dearly regretted what he'd just done. In truth, Agravaine did not quite understand it.

You might expect this to cause some particular hatred between the two; but as time passed, it became an unspoken bonding passed, it became an unspoken bonding point. For Gaheris it was simply that, seeing Agravaine standing there looking so ill, he would keep the secret conviction that Agravaine regretted what he'd done, even though the other boy was to insist himself that he felt no such thing.

Agravaine was a different matter, because Gaheris' entrance caused him to begin using his head. Normally this would have involved some immediate cleverness, some lie to help him get out of the terrible danger he was surely in.

Except that Gaheris spoke, in a voice that though it was full of pain, still lacked the hatred he had almost instinctively expected, "You killed our Mother."

Unable to find his voice, he nods instead, and finds himself holding the knife in both hands, offering it to Gaheris. Vicious and intelligent he might be, and fancied himself more mature than his brothers, but his soul was still that of a child, now crying for someone to make it better. That part of him reached out to Gaheris even as it recoiled from the loss of their Mother.

He walks forward slowly, because he is shaking all over and worried he will fall. When he reaches Agravaine, he takes the knife, staring at it where their hands close over the hilt for a long moment. Then he snatches it away, hardly noticing he's nearly cut Agravaine, nor the faint flash of resentment from him because of it. He takes it to the little window and throws it out, neither thinking nor caring where it might land. He turns back to find Agravaine has collapsed, and is busy being ill, and he goes over to him to wait it out.

***

Gareth, coming down the stairs, finds Gaheris clinging to Agravaine in a desperate hug. He also sees their Mother lying in her bed, with her throat cut horribly, and her eyes open in a shock he could never describe except to say that it froze him straight through.

He turns soundlessly back up the steps, racing to wake up Gawaine. His heart is pounding, and his mind in such a whirl of headache and fear that he could not have thought clearly. So he did not understand that getting their eldest brother is the worst thing he could possibly have done. In confusion, Gareth is at his most innocent.

It hardly took a moment for him to make it back to the tangle of sheets that held Gawaine; it took a bit longer to drag him out of his sleep.

It took no time at all to judge his reaction to the scene as he made his way downstairs, and to regret having woken him. But it was all that Gareth could think to do, with Mother dead and Father off making war against the Sassenach.

Gawaine slowed coming into the room, and for long moments his mouth moved but no sound came out. Then a sound, almost a cry and not quite the word `mother'. Then he stalked over to his younger brothers and shook them both, demanding to know what had happened. Gaheris shook his head mutely, but Agravaine had turned away from his elder brother and tried to hide his hands.

It is probably the sight of the blood on them that causes Gawaine to lose his temper, if that black passion of his could be called so simple a thing as temper. Certainly once he has recovered he will not be able to say what has happened. He is to spend some days glaring at his brother with hate in his eyes, or accusing him of planning to kill the rest of them, and other horrible things he will never quite admit to regretting.

It is possible the worst of the problems between Agravaine and Gawaine arose not out of their differences, but out of their strongest similarity; that is, both of them would rather face the worst the world could throw at them than admit to being wrong.

 


End file.
